On July 9, 2004, fourteen of the fifteen Justices
on the International Court of Justice delivered an
‘advisory opinion’ on Israel’s apartheid
barrier that accurately reflects the world’s
growing moral outrage against Israel’s determination
to push the Palestinians to the wall and beyond. Appropriately
– and yet, to our shame – the only contrary
opinion was rendered by Justice Thomas Buergenthal,
an American.
The
Justices declared that the wall being built by Israel,
“the occupying Power, in the Occupied Palestinian
Territory, including in and around Jerusalem, and
its associated régime, are contrary to international
law.”
The
Justices informed Israel that it is “under an
obligation” to stop work on the wall, dismantle
those portions of the wall that have been built, annul
the legislative régime erected to support its
construction, and render compensation for the damage
it has already inflicted on the Palestinians in the
Occupied Territories.
Finally,
the Justices called upon the United Nations –
especially the General Assembly and the Security Council
– to “consider what further action is required
to bring to an end the illegal situation resulting
from the construction of the wall and the associated
régime, taking due account of the present Advisory
Opinion.”
In
these dark times, when American power has tied itself
irrevocably – for the foreseeable future –
to every Zionist aim against the Palestinians, be
it ever so indefensible, the moral clarity of these
judicial opinions will bring hope and encouragement
to ordinary humans who do not always find it easy
to sustain their struggle in the face of new oligarchies
that practice their dark craft in the name of the
men and women they trample upon methodically. Countering
concerted pressure from the United States and its
allies, the fourteen Justices, five from the European
Union, have decided to apply the universal principles
of justice to the actions of an Occupation that in
its malicious intent, its devastating effects, its
lengthening history, and its potential for fueling
wars has no parallels in recent times.
Yet,
as predictably as it is tragic, the Zionists in Israel
and their allies in the United States – both
Christians and Jews – have responded to ICJ’s
‘advisory opinion’ with hollow clichés
that carry little conviction except with a segment
of Americans, some of whom are avowed Christian Zionists,
others white supremacists, but most have been coaxed
into hating Palestinians by a media that is both mendacious
and malicious in the ways in which it constructs the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Palestinians are
terrorists and anti-Semites to boot; the Israelis,
under threat and in peril, are their innocent victims.
In
editorials and speeches ringing across Israel and
America, a thousand apologists are protesting that
beleaguered Israel is building a ‘security fence’
– not a wall – whose only purpose is to
safeguard innocent Israeli civilians against the primordial
violence of Palestinians. In the columns of the New
York Times, of July 13 2004, a former Israeli Prime
Minister, explains that this “security barrier”
is “temporary,” it extends into “less
than 12 percent of the West Bank,” and it does
not kill Palestinians, it merely harms their “quality
of life” while saving Israeli lives. The unsophisticate
that he is, the Israeli Prime Minister of course cannot
appreciate that a ‘reduced’ quality of life
easily feeds into higher mortality. There are smarter
ways of killing than in death camps with poison gases.
If
the League of Nations, in the early stages of the
Nazi campaign of ethnic cleansing, had had the moral
courage to ask the Permanent Court of International
Justice – the predecessor to the ICJ – to
pass judgment on the legality of this campaign that,
at this stage, included the herding of Jews into concentration
camps, how might the Nazis have responded to an ‘advisory
opinion’ that declared the herding of Jews to
be in violation of international law and called the
Nazis to immediately cease such actions?
The
Nazis might have chosen one of several arguments in
their defense. Given the overt racism of the times,
they could have appealed to their historical right
– as communicated by the World Spirit –
to exclusive ownership of the German Deutschland;
the Jewish interlopers in Germany had to be removed
to make room for the original and rightful owners.
Had they taken a defensive line, they might argue
that the ‘relocation’ of Jews was a temporary
measure, undertaken in the face of clear intelligence
of British plans to use Jews as a fifth column in
their war against Germany. Alternatively, they might
claim that this was a humanitarian move, gathering
Jews into districts set apart for them and where they
would be free to observe the halacha, which they had
been unable to do in the past. They were only making
amends for past lapses. And, of course, they might
have claimed that the Justices were ganging up against
them, singling them out, driven by a new wave of anti-Germanism
fomented by the British and Americans.
There
is a terrible irony in the chorus of loud Zionist
condemnations that have greeted the ICJ’s ruling.
To the eternal shame of the times, when the Jews were
being herded into the concentration camps – where
most of them would die – they had very little
help from the Allied powers, the self-designated keepers
of world conscience. The United States closed its
doors to Jewish immigration. Certainly, there were
no rulings from the Permanent Court on the barbarity
of German plans of genocide. Bitterly, and justifiably,
the Jews have accused the world of letting them die
in the Nazi terror. No Courts, no governments offered
effective support, material or moral.
No
one came to the support of the Palestinians either,
as the British awarded their country to the Zionists,
as the British after occupying Palestine allowed European
Jews to settle the country, form militias, and prepare
to drive out the Palestinians. No Western publics
raised a voice when 800,000 Palestinians were terrorized
into fleeing their homes in 1948 and stripped of their
right to return. No Western publics supported the
Palestinians when they began to resist the Israeli
occupation of West Bank and Gaza. Instead, taking
the cue from Israel, the Western powers branded the
Palestinians as terrorists, and refused to recognize
their existence as a people. The moral indignation
of the Western publics has only been aroused in the
past decade, starting with the First Intifada, which
revealed the brutal face of the Israeli Occupation,
crushing, pulverizing, expropriating a mostly unarmed
people.
Yet
the Zionists today relentlessly accuse these Western
publics of anti-Semitism, of singling them out because
they are Jews. For too long, the Zionists have acted
with impunity against the Palestinians, because they
have succeeded in using the Holocaust to shield themselves
against the censure of Western publics. That makes
the Occupation a perfect crime, without any perpetrators.
Better yet: the perpetrators became the primary victims
of those they victimize.
However,
lately, world conscience has been stirring, waking
up to the insufferable conditions imposed upon Palestinians
by the Israeli Occupation. World conscience is affirming
itself in a hundred ways: in the Internationals who
risk death to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes;
in the willingness of the Belgian Court to try Ariel
Sharon for war crimes; in the reminders by South Africans
that this Occupation is worse than the Apartheid they
had endured; in the academics who initiated a movement
to boycott Israeli academics; in the students protesting
investments in the Israeli economy; in the world-wide
marches, protests and activism against the Israeli
Occupation. And now the International Court of Justice
has spoken, loudly and clearly, against Israel’s
apartheid wall.
Indeed,
increasing numbers of Israelis are speaking out –
even members of their armed forces, those who have
seen the ugliness of the Occupation at first hand
because they were its direct enforcers. Hundreds of
Israeli soldiers have refused to ‘serve’
in the West Bank and Gaza, risking jail sentences.
Other Jewish voices are being raised, warning that
Israel is losing its soul, that the Occupation is
brutalizing young Israeli men and women, who then
brutalize their families, their spouses, their children.
Increasingly, Israeli soldiers are taking their own
lives. This is not a distant colonial Occupation,
thousands of miles away from the European home base,
that could be held down by a handful of soldiers and
hired natives. Every Israeli – indeed a large
segment of world Jewry – participates in this
Occupation.
Is
there a danger that the world may to begin to look
upon Israel as the moral equivalent in our own times
of a Nazi Germany? This ‘moral equivalence in
our times’ does not require that Israel duplicate
all the crimes of Nazi Germany. Instead, the world
will be asking if, relative to the morality and the
constraints of our times, Israel has gone as far as
Nazi Germany did in more barbarous times, when the
extermination of ‘inferior races’ was regarded
as the right of White Europeans.
It
would appear that as Israel builds the apartheid barrier
whose intent is to wall the Palestinians in, sealing
them inside a few miserable Bantustans, it is simultaneously
building another wall, invisible but no less solid
in construction, that is walling Israel out, disconnecting
it from the human community, its laws, its hopes and
its sympathies. Increasingly, in the years ahead,
the world will be asking this question unless it can
see an end to the Israeli Occupation in sight.
